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The coming automation of propaganda

warontherocks.com

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Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#81

Post by [deleted] »

trqx wrote: post #73
zxcmx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the end state is way worse. Imagine campaigns that: Have a general idea of your life stage, interests, career, personality etc, based on advertising profile and commercial surveillance. Can tailor each message to the recipient. Can a/b test the crap out of every message for target groups, optimising for best response. Can deliver fully customised messages in a natural voice (aka google duplex). Conversational ai…

That sounds a lot like how current web ads works to me, only with some further optimizations. Am I wrong ? I hope so.

[deleted]

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#82

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

> While the 2016 election mythologized the power of these influence-actors, such work is slow, costly, and labor-intensive. Humans must manually create and manage accounts, hand-write posts and comments, and spend countless hours reading content online to signal-boost particular narratives. However, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may soon enable the automation of much of this work, massively amplifying the disruptive potential of online influence operations.

All I disagree with is that it's already semi-automated, has been for some time.

A long time ago, I saw a tech support person with a spreadsheet full of formulaic responses for common issues. "We're sorry you're having trouble with _x_ , dear _y_, have you tried _z_. Please accept a $10 discount voucher for your trouble. Thanks, Bobby Techops" kind of thing.

It has progressed, I'm sure. Why wouldn't it? And will progress more.

And the large actors have no incentive to tell everyone how far they have got. The opposite, in fact, they will try to hide it, e.g. Cambridge Analytica being dragged kicking and screaming into the light.

And a small army of clever educated young people isn't that expensive to a large corporate or state actor. Call Centers depend on it.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#83

Post by alexanderdmitri »

im3w1l wrote: post #9

Imagine you go to an online forum and that there is a 99.99% chance that a given message was written by a bot. Imagine further they are sufficiently well written you can't tell from the post itself whether it was made by a bot or not How would people respond to that? Well the obvious consequence is that you have to stop paying attention to random posts. You have to depend on something outside of the forum itself to f…

I can see Turing tests becoming ever more useful (and annoying) going forward.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#86

Post by rmwaite »

riffic wrote: post #39
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone called Neal Stephenson imagined that to perfection in the first third of [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell Amusing to read.

>Someone called Neal Stephenson This is such an interesting way to refer to an author.

To me, it sounds like the kind of phrase an author would use - the sort of playfulness you see sometimes to mix things up.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#87

Post by ErikAugust »

whatshisface wrote: post #27
im3w1l wrote: post #9

Imagine you go to an online forum and that there is a 99.99% chance that a given message was written by a bot. Imagine further they are sufficiently well written you can't tell from the post itself whether it was made by a bot or not How would people respond to that? Well the obvious consequence is that you have to stop paying attention to random posts. You have to depend on something outside of the forum itself to f…

Here's a hot take: you shouldn't be trusting intenet comments written by humans anyway. If a bot comment contains something you should actually listen to (sources, evidence) then you should listen to it, and if a human comment is just a Reddit-style popular opinion dogpile it is just as bad as a bot comment.

My take on this would be that people will start to have their favorite bots. They will follow bots like they follow celebrities.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#88

Post by rdiddly »

GuiA wrote: post #14
im3w1l wrote: post #9

Imagine you go to an online forum and that there is a 99.99% chance that a given message was written by a bot. Imagine further they are sufficiently well written you can't tell from the post itself whether it was made by a bot or not How would people respond to that? Well the obvious consequence is that you have to stop paying attention to random posts. You have to depend on something outside of the forum itself to f…

What you are describing is already ongoing. Many comments in eg widely shared Facebook political posts are likely to be posted by bots, or people paid to be representing a certain agenda (ie human bots). And in that light I disagree with your “obvious consequence” that people will stop paying attention to forum posts, because we know that people do engage with trolls/bots on Twitter/Facebook/etc. People are also fine…

Kind of ironic that the means of fighting the billions spent is to do nothing, which is totally free and takes less effort than e.g. purchasing a TV, purchasing a subscription, starting a social media account and engaging with it, or even reading an article.

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#89

Post by GuiA »

rdiddly wrote: post #88
GuiA wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing is already ongoing. Many comments in eg widely shared Facebook political posts are likely to be posted by bots, or people paid to be representing a certain agenda (ie human bots). And in that light I disagree with your “obvious consequence” that people will stop paying attention to forum posts, because we know that people do engage with trolls/bots on Twitter/Facebook/etc. People are also fine…

Kind of ironic that the means of fighting the billions spent is to do nothing, which is totally free and takes less effort than e.g. purchasing a TV, purchasing a subscription, starting a social media account and engaging with it, or even reading an article.

Yes, but humans abhor doing nothing!

Re: The coming automation of propaganda

#90

Post by strken »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #55
colordrops wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The establishment would just set unfair and arbitrary criteria based on their interests as to who meets the knowledge bar. Anyway it's already sort of an epistocracy. Those "in the know" have more power and already pretty much run things. Ethics and morals are orthogonal to knowledge.

Your counterargument is therefore not with the principle of Epistocracy but rather with the implementation. I've thought about this before and I think I have a way to construct the voting test in a way that is robust to being "hacked". Copy and paste to follow: 1. There is already a de facto voting test for some fraction of Americans. Its called the citizenship test. And I for one find it offensive to basic reasoning…

The problem with the principle of epistocracy is the implementation. When what's at stake is control of an entire country, huge amounts of resources will be directed towards subverting any system that you create.

What's good enough for the purposes of immigration control isn't necessarily good enough for the purposes of voting. A civics exam would select the most motivated groups who are willing to cram, as well as the knowledgeable, and there's no guarantee that the latter would outnumber the former. You want motivated immigrants who are willing to study in order to enter your country, but you don't necessarily want to restrict voting to the group of people who are most willing to put in effort, because that group includes everyone on the political fringe.

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